Letter to the Red Sox

I am a long-time Red Sox fan (since the Cinderella Sox of ’67), who has been especially enjoying the announcing of Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo. They do a great job of making the game more enjoyable, whatever the outcome.

However, I’m writing to express my great dismay over comments made by Jerry and Don during Friday evening’s 7th-inning stretch break.

The man who sang “America The Beautiful” (whose name escapes me) commented to Eric Frede that he’d been married for a year now, and “my wife still has that new-wife smell.” Jerry and Don then spent the next several minutes convulsed with laughter and unable to function because of their great mirth over that comment.

Please let me explain why I find this offensive.

For many years after slavery was abolished in this country, women were still legally regarded as the property of their husbands. Although this is no longer true, vestiges of that kind of thinking proliferate, and are encouraged by comments such as this one, which relegates the wife to the status of an expensive possession.

As a woman watching baseball, I find such comments offensive in the extreme. As a male-only sport, baseball needs to be especially careful to avoid wife- and woman-bashing if it wants to retain female fans. Moreover, and far more seriously, this comment and the reactions of Jerry and Don encourage the tendencies of those men who might be abusive or discriminatory towards women.

It would be enormously helpful Jerry and Don would publicly recognize the potential hurt to women that could be encouraged by their reactions to this comment, and if, in the future, they and NESN would distance themselves from support for such derogatory views.

Thank you for your kind consideration of this matter. I do not wish to take anyone to task, but my enthusiasm for your broadcasts is considerably diminished as a result of this incident, as I’m sure must be the reactions of many other women as well.